In response to the sudden shift to remote learning, history teacher Sarah Cooper has jettisoned her usual fourth-quarter Civil War unit and launched an opportunity for her 8th graders to create podcasts on challenging events in US history. Here’s the project in process.
In Writing, Redefined Shawna Coppola proposes alternatives (comics, podcasts, etc.) to traditional writing assignments to welcome the students who aren’t drawn to essays and book reviews. Literacy coach Pam Hamilton likes the ideas but wonders if teachers are ready for them.
Design thinking allows students to own the knowledge they’re acquiring by connecting content in meaningful ways to their homes, the activities they engage in, their reasons for learning, their transformative life experiences, and their special attributes. Dr. Lindsay Portnoy explains.
We now find ourselves in uncharted territory which requires we improve our remote teaching while we work to maintain calmness, clarity, consistency, and high standards for learning. Teacher educator Dr. Curtis Chandler offers educators a game plan to meet the challenge.
Typical classroom spring cleaning and sorting have hardly happened this year. As distance learning dominates schools, teaching specialist Valentina Gonzalez looks instead at sorting through and acting on our teaching practices: what should we keep, throw away, or begin?
If you’re interested in doing some professional learning at home in addition to the on-the-fly learning that comes with reorganizing your classes so they are distance-friendly, take a look at Principal and NBCT Rita Platt’s collection of online and web-free PD resources.
What the Robbs have done so well is share their experiences as researchers and as educators and provide detailed procedures, anecdotes and insights to guide teachers as they help students become avid readers, writes teacher educator and middle grades veteran Linda Biondi.
Adjusting instruction to virtual learning can be a challenge, and it’s tempting to create easier lessons, says teaching expert Dr. Barbara Blackburn. But educators “need to ensure we hold students to standards that promote deeper learning, no matter the delivery system.”
This is not a casual, read-in-an-afternoon book. It is more like a math master class filled with ways to deepen students’ understanding through a problem-solving approach. Veteran math teacher Michael Hernandez highly recommends its tools and models from start to finish.
If co-teaching is a practice of sharing the classroom and students, what happens when our classroom is literally beyond the walls that usually hold us together? UDL coach Elizabeth Stein brings together current ideas about how to best serve students amid Covid-19, including those with special needs.
